I've Got Promises to Keep
by Reincarnated Poet
Summary: Brian felt a timer in his belly, counting down to something that would end everything, that would make him break so many promises. To Mia. To Dom. To Jack. To his unborn daughter. To Rome. He had so many miles to go before he was done, and yet... Set during Fast 7.


**I've Got Promises to Keep...**

 **RP:** So I cried like a baby during the final scene of the latest movie, like an angry, hungry baby that wanted it's mommy. For some reason, the idea of Dom dying at the end of that movie, of the series ending like that, a perfectly opposite reflection, was stuck in my mind, as well as the promise Rome made of Brian. And my twisted, sad brain took me here. I'm sorry.

Promises were important.

Brian knew that. He knew how important they were when he was small and a scrappy Roman Pierce had held his hand to help him from the ground after a particularly nasty street fight where the pair had gotten thrown together as allies of chance more than anything else. They'd promised each other that day that the other would never be without somone to have their back in those playground brawls, and in the years that followed, they'd more or less kept to that.

Neither of them liked to think about the time after Brian went straight and before Dominic Torretto, and both sort of wrote it off as a blip in their relationship because promises were important.

Brian always tried to keep his promises.

He was a man of his word, and even as he told Rome that there would only be one more funeral, he knew he was a liar. He knew it in his bones. Knew it in the way that there seemed to be a timer constantly counting down in his mind.

He was also a good friend though, and he didn't want his family to worry unneccessarily. At first, when he lept off of the falling bus and just managed to grip the spoiler on the back of Letty's car, he thought that was his timer. He thought that was what they were waiting for.

He was wrong, but he didn't realized it until later, as he stood on top of a building, holding his cell phone and waiting until Ramsey gave the all clear and he could go be of use elsewhere. He never heard those words. He only heard the ragged breathing and the slow drip-drop of blood behind him before he turned and pain exploded through his chest.

Minutes later, the world came back to him. He was slumped down against the cell tower, Ramsey and Letty were screaming at him through the cell, but he couldn't find the wind to respond. Across from him, a man lay propped up against the wall. He'd sent that man to his death not long earlier with a friendly, "Too slow" and a patented O'Connor smile.

He'd not been too slow, it seemed, to climb from the bowels of hell long enough to kill Brian. The ex-detective nearly laughed at the bubbles that seemed to slush up through the chest wound. A punctured lung. The man that lay there was in a similar shape, sluggishly blinking at him with the handgun he'd used laying limply in his hand in front of him.

"Killed each other," he muttered.

"Both too slow," Brian agreed.

The image of what he was leaving behind flashed across his glazed eyes. Mia heavy with their second child. A little girl playing in the sand with her older brother. A young woman going to her first prom, her older brother glaring at the unsuspecting date from the kitchen doorway, Dom behind him, older but still intimidating. Mia and their children, sitting around a breakfast table with a new man, someone interloper that Brian had nearly ordered Mia to find if he didn't call her.

Call.

He sluggishly pecked at the cell phone still in his hand, enabling the speaker functionality and waiting. He tried six times, waiting a few long minutes in between, begging his own heart to keep beating long enough for the call to pick up on the other line.

Finally, a new click sounded. "I'm busy, O'Connor, this better be good." Dom's voice was a rumble of energy, still alive and healthy, but the sharp explosions in the background were clear. Trouble was coming for him as well.

"Take care of them, Dom," he managed after he brought the cell to in front of his face. He couldn't get it to his ear, and he hoped that the microphone picked up his words, whispered and wet.

"Brian?" he heard, the tone different, panicked and on edge.

"Tell me you'll take care of them," he repeated. It was important. Promises were heavy things, and they could keep a man breathing longer than he should.

"You're gonna do that, Buster. I swear, if you leave Mia alone-"

"Dom," he muttered, barely able to hold onto the phone for the blood on his fingers and the weakness there, the unfamiliar weakness that soaked into all of him. "Dom, please. I...I can't."

He sounded desperate even to his own ears, and that plea must have gone through the phone because after a moment of silence where only explosions sounded, Dom responded.

"I can't make that promise," he said, voice laced with pain and anger and guilt. "Damn it, Bri, I can't-"

The line cut off to the sound of twisting metal and popping glass. Brian hit redial, but there was only a busy signal at the other end of the line. Too weak to lift the phone anymore, he let it fall down to his lap, his hand resting atop it.

"You still alive over there?" the other man called.

"Not going to die before you," Brian said in response. He wasn't sure if he was telling the truth or not though. His legs were numb, and his fingers and lips were starting down a similar road. He had lost too much blood. His body was shutting down.

With fumbling fingers, he poked at the phone again, bringing up a recent contact and pressing the send button sluggishly. Garish red smeared the screen, but by some miracle, the call sent, by another, the speaker initiated.

"Yo, Bri," Rome's voice was strong, but there was something in the tone that was heavy, as if he didn't want to tell him something. "You'd better get down here man, Dom's gone. He's gone, man."

Brian knew, he thinks, in those last few seconds. His timer had reached zero, and it was only a stubborn promise that kept him alive.

"M'sorry, Rome," he said. The other man knew, just with those words, Brian was sure. There was none of his usual confidence, none of the posturing, to the response. "Two more funerals." The pause that followed was so long Brian almost thought he'd died between breaths and that this was somehow his hell: a world where Mia raised his children alone, where Dom was dead before him, where Rome never forgave him for breaking his promise.

"It's alright, brother," Rome said back. "It's alright. I'll see to things now."

In the next moment, he was sitting in a white Supra, staring across a car width at Dom, in his Charger, who was staring back.

"Who said you could leave without saying goodbye?" he asks. There is no response. There is only the race. The road is long, it is winding, the lanes part. Brian goes up over mountains, through clouds and high places that are as dangerous and volatile as his own heart. Dom's road leads him through the bowels of the earth, to places that are gritty and edgy and perfect, and at the end of their roads, they come back together at a little, grungy garage at the end of the world.


End file.
